About

Noepe Martha’s Vineyard Center for Literary Arts

Justen Ahren ~ Noepe Founder & Director

The Noepe Center is a nonprofit organization seeking to advance the appreciation of and passion for the literary arts in adults and young people through programs that support expression, education and the sharing of writing and literature.

Noepe has a very simple mission: to provide established and emerging writers with time and space to create, and the resources and community to support, encourage and inspire writers at all stages of their writing career.

Located on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Noepe Center serves as a writer’s residency, a writing retreat center, workshop space, a place of learning and creativity, and as a community in support of writing and the literary arts, and venue for readings, author talks, and other literary events.

The name for the Center – pronounced No-weh-pay – comes from the Wampanoag Native American Tribe name for Martha’s Vineyard which means, land between the currents. We see this island and the work of the center as a still place, a place of refuge, a sanctuary from which great writing will emerge.

Noepe and its residency program was named one of the top 20 residency programs in the United States in 2014. Noepe has provided time and space to over 300 writers across every genre, hosted readings by poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jennifer Clement, Fanny Howe, Geraldine Brooks and many more. More than one hundred novels, books of poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs and works of non-fiction have been published by our residency alumni, as well as countless articles and anthologized stories and poems.